PHILADELPHIA — As Matthew Wolfe drove from polling place to polling place in West Philadelphia and the University City neighborhood here today, the General Counsel for the (insurgent) Republican City Committee and Philly Republican party activist was finding himself facing an all-too-familiar problem: He was running low on Republicans.

"I am a little annoyed," Wolfe told me as he arrived at one polling location, "because I had a guy who was supposed to be here and is not."

Minority parties — and in Philadelphia, Republicans are certainly that — are guaranteed a seat at every polling place in the city. But for decades, they've had trouble mustering the numbers. The shortage of manpower today had apparently held things up at at least one West Philly location in Wolfe's ward, and one woman watching over the poll — a (Democratic) ward leader herself — was none too pleased with Wolfe: "You want to be a Republican? You're proud to be a Republican? Do your job!" she shouted at him, adding that she found Wolfe to be "an incompetent ass."

He took it in stride — maybe because such is often the lot of a Philadelphia Republican: you aren't given much to work with, and you aren't very popular.

It's been two decades since Pennsylvania went to a Republican candidate for president. And for most of this election — ever since Obama's blowout victory here in 2008, really — this has been a kind of second-rate swing state, to be visited and paid-for only in between visiting and paying for the more important ones.

But Democratic dominance has waxed and waned within the state — in 2004, Senator John Kerry beat President George W. Bush by a tiny margin — and Republicans, it seemed, even in the bluest of blue Philly, were still praying for red.

Romney visited Pittsburgh on Election Day, just as the last few Republican candidates had in the homestretch, with his campaign doubling down on voter outreach in places like the Philadlephia suburbs, which have denser populations that have seen slimmer margins between Republican and Democratic presidential candidates.

But Philadlephia County itself — by far the largest and densest in the state — has remained a staunchly Democratic stronghold for, well, just about forever. President Obama won more than 80 percent of the vote here in 2008, picking up just slightly fewer votes than the total number by which he beat Senator John McCain statewide. If Pennsylvania is a battleground, Philadelphia is the left's inpenetrable fortress.

Of course, that's not how Philadlephia Republicans see it — at least, not all of them. Since Obama's election, a small group of Philly Republicans, among them Wolfe, has been staging an insurgency from within, aimed not so much at the city's democratic strongholds (not yet at least) but at their own, seemingly-moribund party.

The spark that started the revolt was a deeply, boringly, intra-party scandal over the decision by Republican leaders to back some Democartic-endorsed candidates judges. But it was, apparently, still enough to start a revolt. "I was like, we should be supporting Republicans," Wolfe says. "As the minority party, we have a responsibility to provide alternatives."

The group, going by the moniker "The Loyal Opposition," began running its own Republican candidates against those chosen by the Republican City Committee, scoring a series of small, but significant, victories: Last year, they installed one of their own over a longtime party-backed incumbent for a seat on the city's election commission. They elected their own city party chairman. One of their members, John Featherman, ran for mayor and is now running a campaign (in his own words, "quixotic") to oust Democratic Party boss and Pennsylvania Congressman Bob Brady. For this election, they recruited some 300 minority party polling place inspectors to fill long-vacant Republican seats at the polls. Chris Lins, a Republican committeeman and board member of the city's newly-revitalized Young Republicans of Philadlephia club, said that when he showed up to man a polling place in his division, "I think I was the first person had done it in 15, 20 years. The [election] judge was like, 'Wow, a real Republican!'"

The numbers haven't swelled enough to save Republican rabble-rousers like Matthew Wolfe from having to put up with the fact that several of the polling places in his own ward still lacked a single Republican representative.

As he went from one polling place to another on election-day morning, Wolfe was upbeat about the future of that still-rare species, the Philadelphia Republican.

"There's over 130,000 of us, and we're growing, and we're getting stronger," he said emphatically. "If we shave Obama's margin in Pennsylvania from 400,000 to 300,000 or something like that, hey, that's a big difference."

As he stood next to a Romney sign he'd planted — at a polling place in an overwhelmingly pro-Obama neighborhood in a largely-black part of West Philadelphia — an elderly woman approached Wolfe.

"Who put that sign there? You?" she asked, pointedly but not rudely. He nodded.

"Well, I'm going to take it down when I come out," she said, and went in to vote.

Wolfe, looking as out of place as he had all day, smiled politely and looked at the ground. "Well, that's not very nice," he said quietly.